Table of Contents

Hardware Status

Normal screen is currently out of actiongubbed. Tim recommends checking caps however not enough time was available on the day of discovering the screen being out. A temporary screen has been put in place to allow for interim IRC usage.

Project Background

Rob wanted a way to promote IRC use and make it feel more part of the lab rather than a separate 'IRC club', and also open it up to non-IRC users and provide a way to quickly reply. Similar IRC terminals exist at other hackerspaces, such as Helsinki Hacklab.

Piecing it together

The Pi is back-powered via the hub, which is in turn back-powered via a small in-line 5v 1A PSU originally for a Zip drive. There are a few of these useful PSUs in use in the lab. The back-powering is a result of only wanting to use bits in the 'cables for butchering' box.

Pi, USB hub, and PSU are velcro'd on to the back of the monitor. The monitor is mounted on the wall using a wall bracket salvaged from a smashed TV that was being thrown out. The wall bracket is capable of a wide range of movement.

The keyboard is bodged in place using lots of hot glue and some L brackets which are stuffed behind the conduit. Seems solid for now.

Wifi

Terminal is connected to the main 'Hacklab' network. Wifi was showing to be very unreliable in 'n' mode. Having forced an arbitrary speed of 22Mbit/s, the wifi is now stable. Other Pis using similar dongles have experienced high latency and loss too. The problem doesn't exist when connected to different access points.

The following script has been added:

/etc/network/if-up.d/iwconfig

#!bin/sh
iwconfig wlan0 rate 22 fixed

The following has also been observed from time to time in the logs (syslog, dmesg):

Powering on/off the screen automatically

The screen turns off when the lab is empty and turns back on again as soon as someone enters the lab and triggers the PIR. This happens via the message bus and is handled by idle.py which is currently run from rc.local. idle.py was written by Tim initially.